Our budget for the Camino - days and money

Its a question I know alot of people ask, some out of curiousity, others wanting to know so should they want to follow the steps of thousands of pilgrims, they have a ball park figure.

Firstly, how long does it take?

Hmm how long do you have?

How fit are you?

How strong are your legs and tough are your feet?

The suggested route is 28 days, but its grueling and has most days of 25 km plus.

The 'long' or 'slow' route suggests 45 days.

We have 57 days alocated to start and finish the walk. Two of these are taken by arriving and leaving and one taken for the Pilgrims Mass at Santiago Cathedral. I'd like to at least another day in Santiago to hire a car and go to the sea ( an extra 120 km) to complete it. So in reality, we have 53 walking days. Do the quick maths to see that we still have a formidable 15 km a day to do. Some 15 km days will be easy, others grueling and extremely tough.

Morgan is our trek leader and has alot of it mapped out. We plan to knock over 20 and 25 km days when its sort of flat, so that we can ease up on other days and not do so much.

Of course we have a back up plan to catch a bus or taxi if its just too hard.. But the three of us want to be able to say we walked the lot. 

Our first two days were always going to be hard.. Getting up the mountain and getting used to walking. We did 11 km the first day and 13 the next.

Our third day we decided to take it easy and only did 12 - arriving just after lunchtime, so had the whole afternoon to sleep and recover. Our next few days will be our catch up on miles.

 Money

Again.. Whats your comfort level 

and how much do you have?

We have alocated a pretty generous 100 euros a day for the three of us. 

You normally buy everything from cafes and bars as you walk, but we plan to carry lunch and snack things with us. Most bars do a fresh orange juice and great hot chocolates, not to mention the giant boccadillos ( half a frech stick cut in half ways and filled with cheese and ham or chorizzo) or fab torilias ( an omlette witg potato and cheese)  we get two between the three of us. 

We have 7 euros a day allocated for bags or bus or taxi. We dont plan on obviously using this every day. The bag thing is a transport service to send your luggage forward. We plan to use this only on tough uphill days. The allowance for bus or taci are for days where the alburgues we plan to get to are full and we need to go to the next town. Often the thought of having to walk another 5 or 10 km is enough to make you cry..esp after a long day.. Being locked into arriving where your bag is sometimes is restricting, so we want the freedom to be able to stop when we feel its enough for the day.

Broken down, our budget for the three of us looks like this: 

Breakfast 17 ( orange juice, hot choc, boccadillo or the omlette thing)

Lunch 17. ( orange juice, hot choc, boccadillo or a selection of pinchos)

Snacks and drinks 9

Dinner 20 ( two pilgrim menus between the three of us)

Alburgue 30

Bags 7

By no means is this extravagant, but its not penny pinching either.

We dont always use all of this up, so plan to keep alittle aside to splash out on nicer accomodation at times ( with proper beds, shower to ourselves..)

So, hopefully that answers a few practical questions for you!